Virgin Media executive Malcolm Wall today claimed that its video on demand service via TV has grown to the point that its audience is larger than that for Channel Five.

However, Wall, the Virgin Media chief executive of content, also admitted that the company is not marketing its football offering as effectively as he had hoped.

He said Virgin's VoD service had clocked up 30 million individual clips viewed last month, from 3.5 million subscribers. Wall added that this "put it past" Channel Five's consolidated viewing for October.

"By the end of the year [the Virgin VOD service via TV] will be the third or fourth most watched channel on our platform," he said, speaking on a panel at the European Media Leaders Summit on how internet video is transforming the distribution of content.

When asked by the panel chair about the popularity of Virgin's broadband video service via its website, Wall said that last month there had been 1.5 million individual clips viewed.

However, pressed on how popular Virgin's football, he said it accounted for about 1 million clips. Virgin has the video-on-demand rights to clips and highlights from the Premiership.

"I don't think we have implemented marketing as well as we could have," Wall added. "There is not as much traffic from [non-Virgin customers] as we could have. We have only tapped 50% of the potential."

Wall added that he was currently looking at the marketing strategy and plans for the first quarter next year to address this.

He said that Virgin's broadband strategy was just one part of a business he likened to as an "octopus feeding lots of camps".

"The challenge is to try not to do destroy the existing model but to get into new areas even though the speed and value of development may not be known," Wall added.

He said that the cost-per-thousand rates for pre-roll advertisements on videos on the Virgin website were running at about five times the amount as for a banner ad.

When addressing the issue of convergence he admitted that although Virgin Media offers a bundle of products - TV, internet, telephony and mobile - "the only thing really converged is the billing system".

Mr Wall identified a number of areas that Virgin was working on boost convergence.

One is through VoD and the ability to personalise the viewing experience, which he said would "give TV some form of the functionality of the internet".

A second issue is access. With broadband speeds of up to 2MB, there would be considerable challenges as more and more video is consumed, Wall said.

Virgin is to launch an "up to 50MB" broadband option next year using its fibre-optic network, something that will be a challenge for other broadband providers using standard exchanges through local loop unbundling, he said.

The third area is the transferability of content between TV- and internet-delivered content - companies in this area include SlingBox and Apple TV, he said.

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